Listed below are four hypothetical scenarios that involve medical mistakes. On your own or in small groups, think of the best (and worst) ways to disclose the error to the patient and/or their family on the basis of the suggestions in the text.

How well does your message uphold the four ethical principles discussed at the beginning of this chapter? How does the severity of the mistake affect your disclosure? What are the differences between disclosing to the patient and disclosing to the patient’s family? Your instructor may ask you to role play your good and bad disclosures for the rest of the class.

• You are a surgeon performing a procedure on a patient who is bleeding heavily somewhere along her digestive tract. You ask your staff for a medication to aid in coagulation to help stop the patient’s bleeding. However, the patient is inadvertently treated with a blood thinning medication and dies.

• You are a nursing student rushing to finish your day so that you can make a meeting with your nursing supervisor. Your last task is to remove the urinary catheter in one of your patients. However, instead of double checking the nurse’s order, you remove the catheter from the patient next door by mistake. The catheter has to be put back in—a very uncomfortable process.
• You are a radiology technician, and you are preparing a patient for his CT scan by injecting him with contrast dye. However, your co- worker failed to complete the patient’s allergy screening form, and the patient breaks out in hives in reaction to the dye.
• You are an emergency room nurse treating a patient with severe pain in her left hand. The patient waited for four hours to be seen in the overcrowded hospital. After taking cultures on the patient’s hand, you accidentally label the specimen with another patient’s name. As a result, the patient was misdiagnosed with a local infection. Later, doctors were forced to amputate the patient’s left arm after discovering that she had flesh eating bacteria that had spread to her forearm.